A good rule of thumb is that if the cover of a DVD says in semi-large type: “STATE-OF-THE-ART CGI ANIMATION!” you can bet that it contains nothing of the sort. Even if I don’t especially like a movie I always like to at least start off complimenting something, anything that I thought was well-done in the film. After watching all 79 minutes of Kong: Return to the Jungle (I wasn’t sure I would make it all the way through) the best I can do is to say that the voice acting is tolerable. I already lost more than 79 minutes of my life watching and reviewing this complete and utter dreck, so I will waste as little of your time reading the review as possible. I will try to hit all the bases quickly so as to save us both a lot of time.

The script is dreadfully simple, predictable and surprisingly slow – another high point of this film. The animation was best summed up by a friend of mine who said, “it looks like it’s not fully rendered.”

That may mean little to anyone unfamiliar with computer animation, but what it boils down to is I wouldn’t trust these animators to put together a pie chart for a business meeting. The shading added to the animation is of a single intensity, which just serves to point out how simple the animation is. The character design is inept, but not as inept as the character animation. This level of animation makes the Thunderbirds to be some of the most expressive characters ever. Each character seems to have two or three expressions and the lip synch is so bad it makes me wonder if the original language was something other than English. The sound effects sound as if production had one CD of effects that they used whether it fit or not to the point where I believe they only had one foot step sound effect and just repeated it when necessary. There seems to be no actual Foley work on the film at all.

But all of these deficiencies pale in comparison to the “quality” of the music. The score sounds like it was done on a Casio keyboard and there are a good four or five songs. I can’t remember how many songs exactly. I’m not going back to watch again to get an accurate number; I love you readers, but not that much. The songs don’t progress the plot, but seem to be more a way of getting this slim plot to a feature length. They’re a time out from the plot to feature the bad animation in a musical montage. Their music sounds Casio keyboard simple and the lyrics are worse than the song your buddy makes up when he’s had seven too many shots of Jagermeister.